From Dust to Glory The plan
Illustration · A rainbow over wet hills after rain, and smoke rising from an altar of rough stones. Not drawn from a photograph.

Day 3 · Genesis 8–11

A Bow in the Clouds

The waters go down, a promise to every living thing, and a tower that never reached the sky.

Day 3 of 365Beginnings

Today’s reading · about 12 minutes

Genesis 8–11

The flood ends, the covenant, the nations, Babel

Read it

No psalm today. The daily psalms come back on Day 4, with Psalm 2.

Themes and asks

  1. Remembered

    Many commentators see the flood story turning on one line: God remembered Noah (8:1). Only then does the wind blow and the water start to fall. Waiting fills the chapter, too: forty more days before Noah opens the window (8:6), then birds sent out again and again.

    • When have you felt forgotten, and what changed?
    • Who needs to know that you remember them?

  2. Every living thing

    God’s covenant in chapter 9 is made with Noah, his descendants and every living creature, and verses 8–17 set no condition on it, though commands about blood come just before (9:4–6). Its sign is the bow in the clouds, and the promise is never again to destroy the earth by flood.

    • What promise have you leaned on?
    • What reminds you of it when you need it?

  3. After the rescue

    Noah, the one righteous man, plants a vineyard, gets drunk and lies uncovered in his tent (9:20–21). His sons answer it in opposite ways, and the story ends in a curse on Ham’s son Canaan. The text doesn’t pause to judge Noah; many readers see a rescued man still able to fall.

    • Where have you seen someone’s best and worst sit side by side?
    • How do you answer when someone you look up to falls?

  4. A name for ourselves

    At Babel the builders want a city and a tower reaching the sky, to make a name for themselves and not be scattered (11:4). They are scattered anyway. In the very next chapter, God promises to make Abram’s name great.

    • Where are you working hardest to make a name for yourself?
    • What would it look like to let your name be given?

Behind the words

The flood, told before

In December 1872, a young assistant at the British Museum, George Smith, told a London audience he had found a flood story on a clay tablet from Nineveh. It was Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh. In it a man named Utnapishtim tells how the god Ea warned him to build a boat before the gods sent a flood.

An older Babylonian poem, Atrahasis, tells the same kind of story, with copies from the 1600s BC. Taken together, the two run close to Genesis: a man warned, a boat sealed with pitch, animals taken aboard, a landing on a mountain, birds sent out, an offering after. In Atrahasis the gods send the flood partly because the noise of crowded humanity keeps them awake. In Genesis it is the violence that fills the earth.

How the stories are related is debated. Most scholars think Genesis draws on a shared Mesopotamian tradition and retells it with one God who grieves and makes a promise. Many traditional readers hold that the Mesopotamian versions are distorted memories of the event Genesis records. Critical scholars also find two accounts woven together in Genesis itself: two of every animal in 6:19, but seven pairs of the clean animals in 7:2.

Babel. The name is Hebrew for Babylon, and the story plays on the verb balal, “to confuse” (11:9). Babylon’s own name for itself, Bāb-ili, was read as “gate of god.” The builders’ bricks and tar (11:3) are Mesopotamia’s building materials, and Babylon’s great temple tower, Etemenanki, is often suggested as the model for the tower.

Two floods, side by side

Genesis 6–9 beside Tablet XI of the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh.

GenesisGilgamesh XI
The manNoahUtnapishtim
Warned byGod, who means to end the violenceEa, one of the gods, going behind the others
The boat300 by 50 by 30 cubits, sealed with pitchA cube, as wide as it was tall, sealed with pitch
The stormRain for 40 days; the water rules 150 daysSix days and seven nights
Lands onThe mountains of AraratMount Nimush
BirdsA raven, then a dove three timesA dove, a swallow, then a raven
AfterAn offering, a pleasing smell to God, and a covenantAn offering; the gods gather like flies; Utnapishtim made immortal

You are here

Day 3 of 365, the last day of Beginnings. Tomorrow the plan steps away to Job, whose story it places in the patriarchs’ world, before Abram’s begins on Day 13.

Mountains of Ararat Euphrates Tigris Babylon Persian Gulf
Schematic, not to scale. Genesis puts the ark’s landing in the mountains of Ararat (8:4), the ancient kingdom of Urartu in today’s eastern Turkey, Armenia and northwest Iran, not a single named peak. Babel is Babylon, on the Euphrates in the land of Shinar.

Threads

Each one opens the plan to the days on that thread.

My notes · Day 3

Sources
  • Genesis 8–11, Holy Bible, New Living Translation · BibleGateway
  • Andrew George, translator, The Epic of Gilgamesh. Allen Lane, 1999; Penguin Classics, 2000. Tablet XI.
  • W. G. Lambert and A. R. Millard, Atra-Ḫasīs: The Babylonian Story of the Flood. Clarendon Press, 1969.
  • The British Museum, the Flood Tablet (K.3375).
  • George Smith, “The Chaldean Account of the Deluge.” Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology 2 (1873).
  • Andrew George, “The Tower of Babel: Archaeology, History and Cuneiform Texts,” Archiv für Orientforschung 51 (2005–2006).

Something wrong here? A date, a name, a quotation? Let me know

From Dust to Glory reads the whole Bible in the order its story happened, one day at a time, at your own pace. Each day gives questions to sit with, the history behind the words, and where it sits in the story. The plan lists all 365 days.